She held it up.
“She’s still alive, see? I thought she wasn’t, but she is,” she explained to Dictionary and the Clocker.
“Edie,” said George quietly. “This might be a bit bigger than that. If we can’t stop what’s happening, it won’t matter where your mother is or why you thought she was dead. . . . There won’t be any when for her to exist in.”
“What do you mean when?” snapped Edie, drinking off the last of her milk and standing in one motion. She stamped her feet to get the circulation going and reached down for the fur coat. She glared at George as she pulled it on. “Saying ‘there won’t be any when’ doesn’t make sense!”
“Actually,” coughed the Clocker, “makes complete sense. Precise definition of predicament. Time out of joint. Stopped dead. No when. No then. Just now. Imperative put time back in joint or all stuck here frozen in time forever.”
He grimaced apologetically.
“And how do you put time in joint?” she said, lip curling. “Sounds like a big job. What do you do? Find time and then just kick it and bang it on the side? Or is there a button you push? Reboot, reset, off we go again?”
“No,” said the Clocker. “Have to go to Queen of Time. She will know.”
“Fine. You go to the Queen of Time. I’m going to find my mum.”
“How?” said the Gunner, looking her straight in the eye.
Edie had no idea, and that made her all the angrier at the question. Her jaw jutted forward dangerously.
“By trying, for a start,” she snapped. “I can’t just not try, can I?”
“Edie,” said George with a glance at the Queen. “Why are you getting so angry? We’re all in this together. Last night you were . . . happy. Now you . . .”
The Officer stepped between them, decisively ending the exchange.
“If the girl got out of bed on the wrong side, so be it. Expect she’ll get over it once the food’s kicked in and the day progresses. We don’t have time for nannying. Sorry, but there it is.”
“Nannying?” said Edie incredulously. “You think I need nannying?”
“It’s not about what you need. It’s about what we talked about. What we all need to do. We’re burning daylight as it is.”
“It stopped snowing as it got light. Pretty uncanny. We think it’ll start again when it gets dark,” explained George.
“Another snowfall like this and we won’t be able to move at all,” continued the Gunner.
“Here’s the plan,” said George. Over his shoulder, Edie noticed the big black bird hop closer to them, right into the shadow of the arch. It cocked its head.
“The Clocker is going to find the Queen of Time. He says if there’s anything to be done, she’ll know what it is. You, me, and the Queen here, Boadicea, are going to go with the Officer and the Gunner to see the Sphinxes. . . .”
“Sphinxes?” Edie choked in disbelief. “Why’ve I got to go back to the Sphinxes? They don’t exactly like me, do they?”
“That’s why we need you,” the Queen said calmly. “Glints are the only things we know of that the Sphinxes are wary of. And when things are awry, or need clarifying between the spits and the taints, it’s the Sphinxes who are most likely to come up with an answer.”
“Not that their answers are the acme of clarity,” grunted Dictionary. “So having someone like you who disconcerts and possibly affrights them may enable us to put their feet to the fire in case of obscurity or obfuscation.”
“It’s not just them that aren’t clear,” said Edie darkly. She snaked the belt out of the loops in her jeans and used it to cinch the fur coat tight around her.
“If there is anything to be done, it is the Sphinxes who will know. It is likely that many other spits will come to ask them. It is a good place to marshal our forces, anyway. There is safety in numbers, and we should look to defend ourselves in case this massing of taints is aimed at attacking us,” said the Queen.
“Well—” began the Officer, but what he was about to say next never got said, because there was an explosion of activity behind them. Everyone spun, and those who had weapons drew them and aimed at a furious whirlwind of snow and feathers and a yowling bronze feline at the foot of the arch.
The black bird—who on closer inspection, of course, revealed itself to be the Raven—was a big bird and a feisty scrapper, but the cat Hodge was just as fierce and much, much heavier. After a few flaps and a lot of aggrieved squawks, the Raven found itself pinned to the snow with a metal forepaw across its neck. The cat hissed in victory, showing its teeth—in no hurry to kill the bird while there was still fun to be had from it. The Raven went limp, hoping the cat would lean lower and try to bite it, so that it could then give it a good hard peck in the eye. The Raven had died and gone to hell so many times before that death itself had no fears for it. What it never enjoyed was the journey back. It always reappeared in the world with its feathers in a shocking state of disarray. Pecking the cat wouldn’t do a bit of good to anything except the Raven’s self-respect.
“It’s the Walker’s bloody bird,” said the Gunner. “Either the cat kills it or I do. . . .”
He cocked the pistol in his hand.
“NO!”
The vehemence of the voice surprised everyone. Including Edie, whose voice it was.
“No. Don’t kill it.”
The cat hissed again and raised its free paw to swat the bird in the head. Cats don’t like being told what to do.
They also aren’t particularly in favor of ferocious girls diving across the snow, grabbing their tails, and flinging them into a snowdrift.
Which is exactly what Edie did.
The cat rolled and turned back with its claws out, ready for bloody revenge.
“Hodge!” bellowed Dictionary. “No!”
Hodge stopped and looked at the girl and the Raven.
The Raven lay on its back and looked at the girl. Part of its natural instinct was to flip over and fly away to safety. But the Raven had seen everything, and forgotten none of it. And one of the things about remembering the past is that it can all get a bit stale. What it was particularly interested in was the opposite of the past, the bits it didn’t yet know about or remember.
Its job was the past.
But its hobby was the future.
What it enjoyed was the simple pleasure of seeing what happens next.
So it ignored the instinct to fly, and waited to see what the glint would do.
What she did was reach forward and move the feathers at its neck.
And now the Raven was so interested it didn’t move a pinfeather.
“It’s still alive,” said Edie, “but there’s blood.”
She suddenly pulled her hand back in surprise.
“It’s not blood. It’s a thread. . . .” She leaned back in and moved the oil-black feathers apart. The Raven didn’t dare blink.
“It’s a red thread.”
“Don’t touch it!” said the Queen and both of her daughters at the same time.
“It’s part of the old magic: ‘Red thread to bind; red thread to catch dreams; red thread to make the wearer not what she seems.’ It must be part of the binding spell the Walker put on the bird,” the Queen continued. “Meddling with the old magic if you don’t know what you’re doing is a very, very . . .”
Edie leaned down and neatly bit through the red thread.
“. . . very bad idea,” finished the Queen.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lost in the Murk
It wasn’t daylight everywhere in London. Inside the ice murk, the gray freezing miasma that slowly billowed out from the Ice Devil’s tower, it was still dark. Anyone flying above the city would have seen that at the center of the whiteness covering everything, the ice murk was a starkly contrasting cloud of near-black fog. It bloomed slowly and inexorably, now a massive black growth six hundred feet high and nearly a mile across that swallowed buildings and exuded into the intervening streets, filling them with its impenetrable gloom.
Somewhere in the middle of this, the Old Soldier was trying to light his pipe. The Young Soldier stood behind him, barely able to see his companion at arm’s distance. The fog was so thick that even the flare of the match as the Old Soldier struck it only showed as a brief frosted globe of hazy light against the side of his face, before sputtering out.
“It’s a ruddy pea-souper and that’s a fact,” mumbled the Young Soldier.
“Pea-soupers weren’t this cold. And they weren’t this thick,” replied the Old Soldier. He held out his arm. He could barely make out the pipe stem in his hand.
“You don’t know where we are, do you?” said the Young Soldier.
“Nah. We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way, baa baa baa . . .” said the Old Soldier. “Little black sheep who’ve gone astray.”
He unlooped his belt and fumbled for the Young Soldier’s hand.
“Hold this end, don’t let go, at least that way we’ll both stay lost in the same place and won’t get split up.” And he walked forward slowly, feeling along the side of the building like a blind man. The Young Soldier followed, clinging on to his tether. It was painfully slow going.
“He was all right, Hooky was,” he said after a bit.
The unseen figure on the end of the belt ahead of him just grunted.
“I never seen nothing like that,” continued the Young Soldier. “It done my nut in, I don’t mind telling you.”
“You was made with your nut done in, youngster,” growled the other. “Now keep your trap—hello.”
The youngster stopped. The belt went tight between them.
“What?” he said nervously. “Oh blimey . . .” He dropped the belt and quickly unshouldered his gun.
“Why’d you do that?” said the Old Soldier’s voice. “You dropped the belt. I said hold on, didn’t I?”
“I thought there was trouble,” admitted the Young Soldier. “I’m sorry.”
He reached ahead with his hand, swiping it back and forth, trying to find the Old Soldier in the murk. Now the panic started to rise.
“Oh bloody hell,” he whined. “I’ve gone and done it this time, haven’t I?”
The Old Soldier stood watching the Young Soldier’s hand with a grin of enjoyment as he lit his pipe. He was not in the murk. He was two paces ahead of the Young Soldier and standing knee-deep in the snow under a bright blue sky, a wide swath of clear air that cut through the ice murk like a firebreak in a forestry plantation. The murk rose up on either side, so that the Old Soldier was in a canyon between two sheer walls of dark fog, walls that were so flat and smooth that it seemed as if the roiling gloom within was being held back by giant sheets of glass.
It was out of one of these flat walls that the Young Soldier’s hand was waving.
“Just stay where you are,” said the Old Soldier. He calmly stuck his pipe in his mouth and took the time to strike a match and get it going properly this time. He took several deep happy puffs.
“You still there?” he said to the shaking hand sticking out of the fog wall in front of him.
“Yes,” came the quavering reply.
“Right,” said the Old Soldier, grabbing the cuff of the Young Soldier’s jacket.
“Oh, thank God,” said the relieved voice from inside the murk.
And then the Old Soldier yanked him forward, and the Young Soldier’s face and then his whole body stepped out of the wall of murk and into the clean air.
He stared around him, blinking. “Hang on. You been standing in the clear all that time? While I was in there?” he asked querulously.
“Had to get my pipe going,” explained the Old Soldier, smiling innocently. “Now come on. Looks like St. Paul’s down there. . . .”
“Right,” said his companion. They walked toward the south elevation of the great cathedral, partially emerging from the fog wall in which it was embedded.
“Blimey,” said the Old Soldier. “We ain’t near where I thought we was. That fog come down and we got turned around good.”
“Well, I’m glad we’re out of it,” said the young one. “As long as we don’t meet that blooming horse.”
The soldier in front froze and raised a hand. They both stopped and crouched, weapons ready.
“What?” whispered the young one.
“Cover me,” said the Old Soldier without looking around. He loped forward through the snow and stopped in front of the cathedral, or at least the corner of it that hadn’t been eaten by the murk. He looked down at something lying in a jumble at his feet. He shook his head, turned to the Young Soldier, put a finger to his lips, and beckoned him forward.
As the Young Soldier hurried through the snow toward him, he kept alert, gun shouldered, panning around for dangers that might be approaching from any direction.
He was at a point where the clear avenue in the middle of the murk intersected with four other streets. He was at the center of a star that radiated in ten separate different directions. He checked each one in turn.
The Young Soldier gagged when he saw what he was standing guard over.
“I know,” said the Old Soldier. “They went hard.”
Fragments of bronze bodies lay around them. Something had ripped apart the Blitz memorial that stood in front of the cathedral. Heads in tin helmets lay apart from torsos that were missing arms and legs. The other limbs were spread about in the snow.
“They was just firemen,” said the Young Soldier. “They wasn’t soldiers.”
“They was spits. Reckon that’s all that matters now,” said the Old Soldier, gathering up body parts.
“What you doing?” said his companion.
“Put ’em back on their plinth. For turn o’day,” said the Old Soldier. “You ain’t got the sense you was made with.”
“Right,” said the other, reaching for a sightless head. And then he went very still, his eyes widening at something over the Old Soldier’s shoulder.
The Old Soldier caught the look and froze. “What?” he mouthed.
The Young Soldier just pointed with his chin. The Old Soldier turned in time to see a huge bronze lion’s body, about the size of a large elephant, as it followed its head into the sheer wall of the murk. Neither spoke until the tip of the lazily twitching tail had been swallowed up.
“What was that?” breathed the Young Soldier.
“Dunno,” said the Old Soldier. “But if it’s as happy to walk in the murk as in the light, it’s up to no good.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Red Thread
Edie looked down at the red thread between her fingers. It didn’t seem very magic. It was just thread.
The Raven jerked and flapped to its feet and then just stood in front of her, pecking and preening its ruffled feathers back into some kind of order, keeping its eyes on Hodge, who was very still, watching from the edge of the drift into which Edie had flung him.
“Why did you do that, child?” asked the Queen.
Edie didn’t know why she’d done it, not in a way she could explain. Her mind was still half jumbled with sleep, a tangle of too much exhaustion and too many “maybe”s again: maybe she’d done it because she had to, maybe because it felt like the thing to do. Maybe she knew what it was like to be imprisoned—although maybe she wasn’t kind, maybe she was just clever. Or maybe she’d done it because she knew the moment she felt it that the Walker had placed the thread there, and she instinctively wanted to undo everything he’d ever done. Then again, maybe she just liked birds.
“A bird saved me,” she said.
“What bird?” said George.
“In my dream,” she said, beginning to get irritated. “Look, I don’t know, an owl saved me in my dream, and I didn’t think about it much; it just seemed like the thing to do.”
“An owl?” said the Queen. “In your dream? An owl watched over you?”
Edie looked at her in surprise. “Yeah. A gray owl. . . .”
“Andraste,” said one of her daughters, coming closer.
; “Or Arianhrod,” said the other.
“Who?”
“Different names for the same White Lady. The moon goddess,” explained the Queen. “You see, you are wrong. You’re not on your own. No one ever is.”
“Goddess?” snorted Edie. “There’s no such thing as goddesses. It was an owl. In a dream. That’s all.”
“A goddess comes to you in a dream and you think it’s nothing?” hissed the Queen in disbelief.
“I don’t believe in goddesses. Or dreams. Or magic,” Edie said flatly. “I believe in me and what I can see and what I can do.”
“What about your power? What about your glinting?”
“Not magic, is it? It’s just what I do. I can feel the past in stones like dogs can hear high-pitched noises humans can’t. It’s not magic. It’s just a thing.”
Edie balled the red thread and stuffed it into her pocket.
“You don’t make sense, Edie,” said George. “After all that’s happened to us, you can’t—”
“Yes I can,” she said. “I can do what—”
And at that point Hodge leaped for the Raven, and the Raven lofted into the air and came to rest on Edie’s shoulder, so neatly that the cat got nothing but a face full of snow and embarrassment.
Cats hate looking stupid more than anything else in the world, so Hodge twisted in a fury and prepared to spring up at the Raven again.
“No!” shouted Edie.
Hodge stopped dead. He looked at the girl. He looked at the Raven. And then he slowly walked away, as if suddenly bored by the whole affair.
“Takes one catamount to know another,” said Dictionary, stooping to pick the cat up and stroke some dignity back into the affronted animal.
The wind, which had been entirely absent until now, picked up a light swirl of snow and blew it across the empty space between the arch and the war memorials.
“You don’t believe in goddesses?” repeated the Queen in a voice no warmer than the ice crystals dancing across the top of the snow.
“No.”
“Or gods?” asked one of the daughters.
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